His Dark Materials:Current events
Current Events is a centralised spot on the wiki where the community can discuss topics that concern the whole of the wiki. Think of it as a talk page for the entire database. If you want to open up discussion about a particular article, please do so on the talk page for that article. Don't forget to indent and sign your posts to make discussion easier to navigate. Deletion Is someone with the permission please going to finally delete the fanfictional species pages like Anemoi and all the others that I marked for deletion? -- Noneofyourbusiness 17:55, September 17, 2011 (UTC) :I just visited the fanfic page above, and this wiki's "delete" template needs to be edited; since when was there a 16th month? European date format (dd/mm/yy) is far more widely used than American, but International (yyyy-mm-dd) is the only one that makes sense to use on the World Wide Web. — RobertATfm 00:24, May 27, 2012 (UTC) :To get back to the original post in this thread, the problem is that neither Anemoi nor any of the other pages mentioned are, in fact, correctly marked for deletion; they don't use the {delete} template. nor are they otherwise in the Category:Candidates for deletion category. The only pages in that category are some spam I flagged this evening. — RobertATfm 19:30, June 4, 2012 (UTC) ::I've just gone through all of your user contributions, to find all the pages you "marked for deletion" in order to properly mark them for deletion (a tedious process). Next time (if there is a next time) do the job correctly; use the delete template, don't just copy and paste the contents; so that the page actually ends up in the "Articles for Deletion" category instead of just having even more rubbish added to it and remaining unnoticed. While you're at it, format your dates properly; e.g. 2011-09-17, not "9/17/11", which is meaningless in most of the world as there's no 17th month. ::The easiest and quickest way to combine both the above points is to copy and paste the follwing into every page to be deleted: . (That's five tildes, not four, hence it creates a timestamp only. Three is username only; four, as is widely known, creates username + timestamp.) ::This of course also applies to anyone else reading this. -- RobertATfm 03:00, July 8, 2012 (UTC) :::In the above I've come across an article (Phoenixes) which is triply bad; (1) I don't recall this creature being any part of HDM; (2) if it belongs here, the title should be singular; (3) in any case the correct plural is "phoenices" (like the country Phoenicea). A similar point applies to the article "sphinxes", which should be "sphinges" or "sphynges". -- RobertATfm 03:00, July 8, 2012 (UTC) Series timeline A few days ago, an anonymous editor edited several character pages in order to insert the claim that Lyra's universe runs 35 years behind ours; I wondered (on Talk:Lyra Silvertongue) whether there was any basis for this claim, until the same IP came up with the Wikipedia page for the series as the "source" for the claim. Hence I reverted the edits, since (1) by their very nature, wikis open to editing by anybody can never be reliable reference sources, as demonstrated by [[wikipedia:Talk:Ronnie_Hazlehurst#The_SClub_7_Hoax|the hoax claim that Ronnie Hazlehurst co-wrote Reach by S Club 7]] which started as a vandal edit to his Wikipedia article, but was carelessly perpetuated by some media because he died not long afterward (indeed, Wikipedia's own official policy pages state that it isn't a reliable reference); and (2) in any case, the Wikipedia article claims that Lyra's universe has the same timeline as ours, not an out-of-sync one. Now another set of anonymous edits (by a different IP, but of course this could be the same person) has been made claiming that the series begins in 1958 (of both universes this time), but again I know of no source for this claim other than the Wikipedia article (no source was given). I've thus reverted again. Maybe this wiki should disallow anonymous edits? — RobertATfm 00:24, May 27, 2012 (UTC) :There is proof for the story beginning in 1958. In The Amber Spyglass, Mary thinks to herself that it's been 300 years since the Royal Society was founded. The Royal Society was founded in 1660, making it 1960 during the Amber Spyglass, when Lyra is 13. If Lyra is 11 in Northern Lights, then the series must begin around 1958. - Amyosaurus 15:06, June 20, 2012 (UTC) ::Do we have a reliable source for this? As stated by its own policies, Wikipedia isn't a reliable source. -- RobertATfm 09:07, June 21, 2012 (UTC) (Mis)use of the Quote template It's good that this wiki has a Quote template to ensure uniformity of appearance when posting quotes; but only if everybody uses it, and does so in a correct and consistent manner. I've recently edited an article where an anonymous editor added two quotes, but did so using ad-hoc formatting instead of the template. Even worse is where the template is used wrongly; it's supposed to be (quote|dialogue|attribution|source), where the third parameter is optional but the first two parameters are not. Far too many uses have been made where the template has only been supplied with the first parameter; I've had to edit the template to make the second parameter optional as well, to fix all those abuses. However, many of them are also another abuse which can't be fixed by bending the template to accommodate it; the fact that a template will only work correctly if there are no line breaks in parameters (in this case, no line breaks even in between parameters). Far too many uses of the quote template have been entered with dialogue with literal line breaks embedded in it; which makes me wonder, did those who entered those quotes bother to use the preview feature, or to look at the effect of their work after they saved it? If so, how on earth did they miss the fact that the quote they inserted hasn't been formatted as desired? The workaround for this is, of course, to use notional line breaks ( ) instead of actual ones; but this entails going to every page which uses the quote template, and manually editing every wrong use of the template to put it right. To this end, I've temporarily made another change to the Quote template, so that it adds pages to the Category:Pages which use the Quote template, and once this change ripples through the system (which could take hours or even days), it will be possible to look at that category for pages whose qoutes may need repair. All that will then remain is to look at all the other pages, for pages with quotes which have been entered without the template. -- RobertATfm (talk) 18:21, July 17, 2012 (UTC) :I've just created another temporary category, Category:Pages which don't need quote repair, to tag pages which have already been checked (and fixed if need be), so as to save duplicate effort. -- RobertATfm (talk) 18:28, July 17, 2012 (UTC) ----